The life shifting impact of suicide.
Straight in with a poem this week:
Is that how you feel?
Oh....
Really?
I’m sorry, I don’t mean to query
Your feelings.
I feel…
The same way!
So I thought.
But I didn’t,
I don’t.
I couldn’t.
I won’t.
I miss you.
That’s all I can say.
I wrote this poem YEARS ago. It summed up the conversation I had had with a friend, in which I had attempted empathy (our feeling of the week).
You know, that thing where you arrange your face in a concerned manner, cock your head to one side to show you are REALLY listening and 'Mmm' along.
We were in her apartment in Spain, my friend confiding in me that she didn’t think that she could go on. We were both on our year abroad in Oviedo during our university degrees.
Oviedo is now described by the Lonely Planet as a ‘fun, sophisticated city’.
It’s changed a lot.
I had had dreams of going to Spain for sun kissed days and sangria filled nights but was met with a place that reminded me of Wrexham.
My friend was finding being there too much of a struggle, and needed to go back home, but she felt like such a failure for not ‘sticking it out'.
My 20 year old attempt at empathy focussed on advising my friend that maybe she would feel better if she thought about how the sun would rise again tomorrow, or reminding her how much her boyfriend loved her, or reassuring her that she could totally give herself permission to jack in her whole degree and move back to England, she just needed to SAY THE WORD.
The word she said was, ‘Sure’ and she smiled and she told me she would be fine.
And my 20 year old empathy was worried, sure, gravely concerned even, played with the idea that this was deadly serious… but then it shook itself down and told itself, ‘Surely not’ and, ‘Everything will be ok'.
The next morning, it was clear that things were most certainly not ok.
Arriving breathless at the hospital to see her, but being stopped in my tracks, taken to a side room and gently being told ‘se fallecío’, my empathy was all out of suggestions.
My dear friend. My vibrant, funny, silly accents, silly dancing friend.
My dear friend, who was vibrant, was funny, was always doing a silly accent or dance.
Was a was. Not an Is.
My dear friend who had a ‘mental disorder’, a ‘chemical imbalance’, who was given enough pills by her psychiatrist to ‘see her through’ and then packed off to a different country with those bottles of oblivion.
My dear friend, whose dire history of trauma was sequestered into late night drunken sisterly conversations of sorrow and despair.
Was a was. Not an Is.
And after we brought her back and buried her, as my future stretched out ahead of me full of suns still to rise, I was left with the question:
How could I, who was so dire at empathy, possibly find any for myself?
Empathy isn’t just understanding what someone is going through. It is having the capacity to be able to reflect back to that person exactly what they are going through, without filters of fixing or suggestions of supposing.
Reflecting back, just as it is. Just as they are.
This is what it means to 'feel seen.'
That is a rare skill; acquired, I believe, through only experiencing it yourself.
How can you give empathy if all you have ever received is fixes and suggestions and supposes?
Luckily, life brought people into my life who could reflect my reality back to me, just as it was.
To be fair, mainly with therapists or in therapeutic communities.
This experience is one of those life shifters which shaped how I show up in the world today; how I am so interested in understanding the why, not the what about people's experiences; the who, not the how.
Of all the feelings that there are, I think that when we truly feel empathy, we feel it in every cell and beyond.
When I have experienced empathy, this is how it has felt.
How about you?
Mind yourselves and if you need help in feeling seen, let me know.
'Til next time,
Jacky x